| TYPE
REFINEMENTS
Following is great information for how to add that
special touch to your grahic design work which will clearly show
you are indeed a professional, and familiar with typographical refinements.
What’s great about a program like Adobe Illustrator is—it
will do the work for you! Just type away in Illustrator, and then
edit your type by choosing “Smart Punctuation” under
the Type menu, and Illustrator will correct dashes, quotation marks,
apostophres, ellipses, ligatures, and even the spaces between sentences
(in case you forget it’s only supposed to be ONE space after
a period, instead of two.)
HYPENS & DASHES | SMART
QUOTES| SPECIAL ACCENTS | ADDITIONAL
INFO
Many other software systems have built-in functions
to correct punctuation, even web-authoring software, such as Dreamweaver
(Insert - Special Characters). You’ll find out how to do this
yourself if the program you’re doing doesn’t have this
special feature.
HYPHENS & DASHES
One mark of professionally set type is
the proper use of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Each is a different
size and has its own proper usage.
The size of the en and em dashes is roughly equivalent to the width
of the lowercase n and m, respectively, for the typeface in which
they are used.
En dashes (–) are
primarily for showing duration or range as in 9:00–5:00 or
112–600 or March 15–31.
Em dashes (—) are the proper dashes
to use in place of single or double hyphens(--) as punctuation.
Similar to a parenthetical phrase (like this) the em dash sets apart
clauses in a sentence.
Hyphens are for hyphenating words and
to separate characters in a phone number (123-555-0123).
Create en dashes with Option-hyphen (Mac)
or ALT 0150 (Windows) — hold down the ALT key and type 0150
on the numeric keypad.
Create em dashes with Shift-Option-hyphen
(Mac) or ALT 0151 (Windows) — hold down the ALT key and type
0151 on the numeric keypad.
Create en dashes in HTML with & #0150;
(ampersand-no space, pound sign 0150 semi-colon). Or, use the Unicode
numeric entity of & #8211; (no spaces).
Create em dashes in HTML with & #0151; (ampersand-no
space, pound sign 0151 semi-colon). Or, use the Unicode numeric
entity of & #8212; (no spaces).
TIPS
Sometimes en dashes and em dashes for a typeface are too small,
too large, or too poorly spaced to be visually pleasing. Manually
reducing or kerning them can improve their appearance.
Hyphens are usually shorter and thicker than the en dashes although
it can vary by font and the difference may be hard to discern, depending
on the font.
PRIMES, APOSTROPHES AND QUOTATION MARKS
Avoid the look of an amateur by properly
using typographer’s quotation marks (curly quotes) and apostrophes
and primes in your desktop published documents.
Don’t use the ’ and “ (Shift + ’) marks on your keyboard for
proper quotation marks and apostrophes [ ‘ ’ “
” ].
On a Mac, use Option+] and Shift+Option+] for the left (open) and
right (closed) single quotes. For Windows, use ALT 0145 and ALT
0146 for the left and right single quotes (hold down the ALT key
and type the numbers on the numeric keypad).
On a Mac, use Option+[ and Shift+Option+[ for the left and right
double quotes. For Windows, use ALT 0147 and ALT 0148 for the left
and right double quotation marks (curly quotes).
In HTML code the characters as & #0145; for ‘ and &
#0146; for ’ and & #0147; for “ and & #0148;
for ” (ampersand-no space, pound sign, number, semi-colon).
Or, use the Unicode numeric entities of & #8216; for ‘
and & #8217; for ’ and & #8220; for “ and &
#8221; for ” (ampersand-no space, pound sign, number, semi-colon).
Called primes, use the upright tick mark ’ for feet
and minutes and “ for inches and seconds as in 1’6“ (1
foot, 6 inches) or 30’15“ (30 minutes, 15 seconds).
TIPS
Many programs offer an option to automatically (as you type or on
demand) convert all ’ and “ marks to typographer’s quotation
marks. Use it to speed up the task but be careful about converting
primes used to designate measurements.
Oversized curly quotes can add interest to pull-quotes in your design.
When using the ALT keystrokes in Windows, use the numeric keypad
not the row of numbers above the alphabet and be sure Num Lock is
turned ON.
CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT MARKS
Circumflex accent marks look like little roofs over a letter and
are found in words like château. In the case of the lower
case i, the carets or circumflex accent marks replace the dot on
the i.
The circumflex accent marks are found on the upper and lower case
vowels  â Ê ê Î î Ô ô
Û û
On a Mac, hold down Opt and i (lowercase i) while typing
the letter to create characters with circumflex accent marks.
Under Windows hold down ALT while typing the appropriate
number code on your numeric keypad to create characters with circumflex
accent marks.
For Windows, the number codes for the upper case letters are:
 0194
Ê 0202
Î 0206
Ô 0212
Û 0219
For Windows, the number codes for the lower case
letters are:
â 0226
ê 0234
î 0238
ô 0244
û 0251
In HTML, create circumflex accent marks
by typing & (ampersand symbol) then the letter (A, e, etc.),
then the letters circ, then ; (semicolon) such as:
& ecirc; (no space) for ê
& Ucirc; (no space) for Û
TIPS
In HTML the circumflex accent marks may
appear smaller than surrounding text. You might want to enlarge
the font for just those characters under some circumstances.
Under Windows, don’t use the numbers
at the top of keyboard. Use the numeric keypad and be sure Num Lock
is turned ON.
Some programs may have special keystrokes for creating diacriticals,
including circumflex accent marks. See the application manual or
help files if these keystrokes don’t work for typing circumflex
accent marks.
HELPFUL LINKS TO WEBSITES WITH ADDITIONAL INFO:
Accessing
Special Characters
Using
Dashes
Top Ten
Typesetting Rules
Don’t
underestimate Type Trends
Dashes
Explained
The
Official Typeface for the New Millenium
Readability
Practical
Typography Tutorials
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